I gave a presentation called ”Being good at waiting – Using Selenium to test Ajax-intensive pages” in an unconf session at the Selenium Conference in London.
The audience was great! Thanks everybody! I certainly didn’t know everything there’s to know about the subject, and that resulted in an interactive session where people from the audience would share their experience and answer some questions. That was so cool 
read more
Unit testing of the GUI is not the same as unit testing through the GUI. We are interested in the logic of the GUI rather than the placement and order of the GUI widgets on screen.
Testing the logic makes the tests less sensitive to changes in presentation but introduces the problem of JavaScript dependent features. AJAX is in the vogue so we wish to be able to do testing of that too without being forced to start a browser. There is some support for AJAX in Wicket that may be reached using the test framework that is part of Wicket. However, it is not straightforward to use and there are some pitfalls.
Here are three examples of avoiding those, one for each of the check box, drop down and radio group controls. read more
Four years ago I spent a few months assembling a rather wide-spread document which I named "State of the art in Server Side Java". It was at the time well researched enough to end up as an entry on The Server Side.
Soon thereafter I got sidetracked to follow Ajax for a few years. I even went as the only Swede to the first ever Ajax conference in San Francisco, and blogged a lot from there.
These days there are simply so much things going on in Server Side Java land to have a slight clue as to where that freight-train is heading. There’s Hadoop and all its cousins for distributed computing, Actors, Terracotta, a school of new whacky persistence paradigms, a handful of JVM-based languages that only Ola Bini has the energy to follow. Annotations have, as I predicted, totally changed the way we program, and just about every day I bump into a new annotation I’ve never seen before (yesterday it was @PathParam).
It would feel OK if this plethora of technologies were somewhat obscure, but in my current project we use a lot of stuff I don’t know well enough, such as Maven, Jersey, WebLogic, Spring transactions and JPA, just to mention a few.
And even though the Ajax anarchy has somewhat collapsed into a few leaders, such as jQuery, Dojo, DWR and GWT, the whole arena is just all over the place. I’ve stopped following Ajax these days, there is just too much going on.
So, what do I spend time on, if I don’t stay up-to-date with server side Java or Ajax? Well, I’m swamped by RSS and Twitter. I abuse technology news like a drug addict, and believed I was reasonably knowledgeable, until I read this blog post yesterday which listed 14 technologies to follow at JavaOne. I had heard of 3 of them, which made me start thinking.
What the heck is going on? Is this technology race accelerating, not just at the rate of the SW industry expanding, but at a pace where it is getting out of control? Have humans triggered the singularity themselves, without the need for a Super Intelligence? Well, perhaps not. The slice of knowledge any human can follow has been shrinking constantly for a long time. But I can’t help getting this idea that the explosion of open source software is giving us the shoulders of giants we can stand on to accelerate our knowledge. And more of it is coming from unexpected countries. Recently I bumped into Debasish Ghosh. Following this guy from India on Twitter is like riding a rollercoaster – new exciting stuff all the time.
So, should we panic? Should we give up? Will every future job search have a list of required skills from a potential list of skills so huge that nobody will ever have a full set? What if we go with maximum speed into polyglot programming, and fragment even further in all directions? Today I heard about two sites where they used Clojure on the server, with Rails as UI. Who the hell can fill that skill set?
Språket Scala har sedan något halvår tillbaka haft ett webbramverk kallat lift.
Bättre start är ju svår att få. Jag bara önskar att jag hade något roligt projekt att testa det på.
Fick precis veta att den första hela boken om DWR kommer i januari eller februari, skriven av Frank Zammetti, som tidigare skrivit flera böcker om JavaScript, Ajax och Java, dvs precis den bakgrund som behövs. Detta borde ge ett lyft för DWR.
